The people of the valley were as Hoke Moore said they were.

“You need a hand, they’ll give it,” Hoke Moore had said.

At Howard Reynolds’s home, Taylor went to the porch to tell Howard and Ada what had happened, and about the plans to keep looking along the roads and to bring the dogs back at first light to try and find Matthew’s trail. Eleanor was with them, sitting close to Ada. She said, “I can take my car and look for him, too.”

“No need,” Taylor told her. “I think we got enough cars to cover every road in the valley.”

“I can go,” Howard said.

“Maybe you better stay here with Ada,” Taylor said gently.

Howard glanced at his wife, saw the exhausted, troubled look in her face. Nodded.

“I’ll be here tonight,” Eleanor said.

“That’s good,” Taylor said.

“What about Noah?” she asked. “Is he going with you?”

“I guess so,” Taylor replied. “We’ll drive down around the store, and up toward your place. If we don’t see nothing, I’ll take him to the turnoff for the lake and let him get some rest.”

“You don’t think Matthew went to the lake, do you?”

Taylor shook his head. “I wouldn’t think so. It’s in the opposite direction to the creek.”

“He wouldn’t of gone down there,” Howard said. “We talked to him about staying away from there. His daddy told him there was a ghost there, just to keep him away from it.”

“I didn’t see any sign of him when I went up to my house a little while ago to milk the cow, but he might have come there after I left,” Eleanor said. “Boyd made him a swing one time, and he liked swinging in it.”

“We’ll look it over,” Taylor promised.

As they drove the road leading to his store, Taylor talked, giving Noah the history of Matthew and of Matthew’s father, Milton, and of Milton’s dead wife, Sarah.

In his youth, Milton had been hard to handle—a roughneck, Taylor called him—and Howard had spent much of his money paying off the troubles that Milton caused. It was how Howard had lost his eye, Taylor said. Tried to stop a fight between Milton and a man named Hootie Magill over a squabble about the trade of a hunting dog. In the fight, Milton had accidentally struck his father in the eye, blinding him.

“It cost Howard an eye, but it changed Milton, knowing what his daddy had done for him and what he had done to his daddy,” Taylor said. “I guess you could say it was a trade—one closed eye, two opened ones. After that, Milton started doing what he could to make up for it. Started going to church and took to religion. Oddest part of it all, he started dating Hootie Magill’s youngest daughter, who was a big churchgoer, and I swear to you, Noah, the prettiest and sweetest girl you ever saw. That was Sarah. They got married when she was eighteen or nineteen, and then Matthew came along. Didn’t take long to know he had some problems, and Milton got it in his mind that it was God’s way of punishing him for all the wrong he’d done.”